Gold at $254/oz a.k.a. "Brown's bottom"!

International journalist Max Keiser has just posted a nine-minute documentary he has done about the British government's gold sales that were begun in 1999 and now are disparaged as "Brown's Bottom," after then-Chancellor, now-Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who decided upon the sales and remains unashamed that they marked the bottom of the gold market. Keiser's documentary is based largely on an interview with Conservative Party opposition Member of Parliament Phillip Hammond, who is shadow chief secretary of the treasury and who remarks that the British gold sales seem to have been structured precisely to knock the price of gold down rather than to maximize the return to the British government. Hammond also wonders aloud whether "something other than achieving the best price" might have been the objective of the gold sales scheme.

But Keiser's documentary may be sensational for getting an acknowledgement from the German central bank, the Bundesbank, that Germany's gold reserves are actually in the custody of the United States. This is a detail the Bundesbank long has denied to others who have inquired and is potentially a matter of great controversy in Germany. It raises the question of whether the German gold reserves are actually intact at all or whether they have been used by the U.S. government as part of its long-time gold price suppression scheme or have been comingled and diminished with the gold reserves of other countries held in the United States.

While Keiser's documentary does not identify the Bundesbank spokesman who confirmed the transfer of the German gold reserves to New York, it does provide the date and location of the confirmation: March 17, 2008, at Bundesbank headquarters in Frankfurt. The documentary shows that Keiser was there and got the interview.

After his interview at the Bundesbank, Keiser remarks: "The most fascinating thing I've heard is that all the gold in Germany is in New York."

Indeed.